X THE FLOWERING PROCESS 



but the real beginner might want to return to Chapters 2, 3, and 4 

 after the other chapters have been completed. 



In the last six chapters I gave in without reservation to the tempta- 

 tion to discuss in some detail my own main interest, relying heavily 

 upon personal research experience. This interest is in the sequence 

 of biochemical and biophysical events which take place within the 

 plant, beginning first with response to the environmental stimulus 

 imparted by the relative length of day and night and culminating in 

 the production of flowers by the plant primary shoot meristems. 

 Although many species are mentioned, the theme of the narrative 

 always centers around the cocklebur. 



This is not because this plant is highly "typical". The converse is 

 probably true, and the principal atypical response of this plant, 

 flowering after exposure to a single long dark period, makes it an 

 ideal research plant. Thus my preoccupation with this species as a 

 "type", even though it is not exactly "typical", is based upon its 

 nature as an experimental object. This nature readily allows the 

 experimenter to think of the flowering process as a series of catenary 

 events, each bearing some time relationship to the single "inductive" 

 dark period. Other plants are now known to be equally well suited, 

 but our experience with them is not yet so extensive as that with the 

 cocklebur. 



In an early version of the manuscript, the book was addressed 

 largely to high school teachers of biology. There was one aspect of 

 this early approach which appealed to me very much : the flowering 

 process is a fairly good summary of biology in general. This is 

 discussed briefly in Chapter 1, and it is hoped that the idea is evident 

 throughout the book. The breadth of such an isolated topic is quite 

 impressive, and this breadth must surely be typical of what one might 

 find upon intensive study in virtually any "narrow" field. There is 

 a unity in science, and the specialist who would really specialize will 

 find more and more that he must be a general practitioner. 



Since it seemed desirable to avoid the style of a literature review, 

 an effort was made to reduce the number of references in the text to 

 a bare minimum. This is possible only because a number of excellent 

 reviews have been written in recent years. These are listed in the 

 bibhography, and section headings often refer the reader to a number 

 of them. Such references in section headings were chosen according 

 to my impressions about the reviews with which I am most familiar. 



